Mainframe COBOL data to pc Microfocus COBOL programs

Very specific question. We are in the middle. We will be receiving data from COBOL programs from a mainframe shop and want to feed the data to some Microfocus COBOL programs we have from an outside source. We have been told that the packed format of the numeric data is incompatible between the two systems, but neither side will unpack the data. I don't understand if this is an ASCII/EBCDIC problem or an incompatibility between the two COBOLs or something else.

We run pc's on a Novell LAN and use Win 9x. Is there some way we can use VB or MS Access to convert this data? I am not primarily interested in someone offering their services to do it, but want the specifics of how it can be done.

Yes, you could write a conversion with VB, or Access (possibly), or COBOL, or almost any programming language.

If you can see ANY of the data correctly then it is not an ASCII/EBCDIC problem, and is therefore almost certainly either packed format, or possibly just signed numerics. I have observed some signed numerics where most of the digits are recognizable but the last character is not a number, but strange symbols, eg. ! for -1, " for -2, etc.

I see your question is some months old. If you are still requiring some help then I could maybe hunt out some COBOL code I wrote for a similar conversion. Please email me, and send a sample of the data, if you still want some answers.

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